NaNoWriMo Begins Again

First, let me announce the manuscript for Wild Skies: Europa Tempest has been completed. We are working to burnish it a bit before we send it on for layout. About 80% of the art has been completed. The comic has been in the bank for a while. Our KickStarter closed one year ago yesterday, so we missed our original target of delivery within one year. That smarts a little, but we rolling forward. I can hardly believe it has been a year already. Writing a whole role playing game from the ground up is hard, let me tell you. Whew! Considering my last major RPG projects all kicked around for multiple years, Wild Skies is proceeding in record time. Always find the latest on our updates page!

What I am really here to talk about is National Novel Writing Month. It’s November and that means it’s time to lay down 50,000 words in 30 days. This is the tenth year I have participated with three victories under my belt. I managed to win last year despite beginning work on Wild Skies and a multi-day trip to see family for Thanksgiving. This year with the editing and layout work to do, I really don’t know if I will have the time for NaNoWriMo. Having said that, one of my victories was achieved in 2013 when there was so much on my plate I needed my novel just to survive. I make no promises. This year I am taking things one day and 1,667 words at a time.

For now, my working title for this year’s novel is The Dream Stele. It is a riff on the actual Dream Stele which sits between the paws of the great sphinx at Giza. The ancient stele tells the story of young Thutmose IV who slept beneath the sphinx on a hunting trip one day. The sphinx was covered in sand. In a dream the sphinx told him he would become pharaoh if he uncovered it. Some version of these events presumably did happen because Thutmose had the story written down on the stele after he did become pharaoh. Assuming the events told on the stele are accurate, I am writing the story of the dream and Thutmose’s subsequent rise to power.

I plan to alternate between three characters. First is young prince Thutmose himself. He’s ambitious and the driver of the events in my story. The scanty scholarship I’ve done on the matter suggests Thutmose may have been epileptic in some form which contributed to his religious convictions. I plan to write him as more manic-depressive. Not in a clinical way, I’ll admit I don’t plan to do much, if any, mental health research. I want to portray him as something of a force of nature. He makes things happen, but no one knows why.

My “real” characters will be the people surrounding Thutmose. Most important will be the engineer tasked with actually moving the sand from around the sphinx. I liked the aquarius hero in Harris’ Pompeii and I have something of a soft spot for Belzoni’s workmanlike engineering so my engineer, as yet unnamed, will likely be a combination of them. I know he wouldn’t think of himself as Sisyphus, but I think he sees himself but in a similar position.

My least realized character so far will be a priestess of Isis. Her story will involve the political and religious side of Thutmose’s rise to power. He wasn’t supposed to be king. Yet he became king. What played out in the halls of power which aided that transition? Whatever story that is will be told from her eyes. I like Jeanne of Arc and I might recast her as my priestess; a character caught up in events “beyond” her because of a clear religious vision. On the other hand, if Thutmose is the religious one and the engineer is the practical one, maybe the priestess plays a role like Valentine Wiggin in Card’s Ender’s Game. She could be the social force which enables what Thutmose is doing to be appreciated. I’ll figure it out as I go along. That’s what writing with abandon is all about.

Right now my word count it 1,721 words.
By now I should have 1,667 words.